The Paper Chase

The amount of paper that comes into our home each day and the amount that we have to manage can easily and quickly become overwhelming.

A good filing system can help you store and find those important papers that might otherwise get lost. Of course, you have to start with a good, efficient filing system and then keep it up.

Keeping it up can be the hard part. Let’s face it: filing papers is no fun.

There are other ways to manage your important papers and keep them safe. They still require some work, but because these are electronic solutions, they will probably take less time.

Here are a few ideas:

Buy a scanner and scan all of your important documents into your computer. Add tags to each file so that they can be more easily located. You might also want to create folders on your computer to make them easier to find.

Once you have them organized on your computer, save a copy to a USB drive or other outside device. You can also upload the files to Google Docs and save them that way.

I recommend storing important documents online because that way they are protected from things like fire or flooding.

Consider a service like Orggit, which stores your files online safely and securely. You scan anything you want to store and upload it to the site. You then have access to your documents from any computer or smart phone.

I use Orggit myself and I like it because it has a lot of pre-made templates that easily allow you to store information that you might not consider, like credit card information.

There are a lot of other services similar to Orggit, like docufree and Memopal. Prices and services differ, so it’s important to compare.

You can also find scanners that include software to store your documents once they are scanned. It’s important that you buy one that allows you to search your documents so that you can easily find them.

There are several of these on the market. They tend to be much pricier than a regular scanner, but it may be worth the extra cost to you.

Whatever solution you decide on, please do give some serious thought to this. As ADDers, we can lose lots of things, including things vitally important to us.